**Invest at the Intersection.** The alpha in AI investing will be found not in crowded SaaS applications but in "Silicon Valley blind spots"—complex industries like biology where AI can bridge the digital and physical worlds.
**Augment, Don't Annihilate.** The winning go-to-market strategy for AI is the copilot model. Frame products as tools that amplify human capability, making experts more productive and profitable, rather than threatening their jobs.
**Judge the Trajectory, Not the Snapshot.** Don't dismiss AI based on a single, past failure. Its capability curve is exponential. What seems like a limitation today will likely be a solved problem tomorrow, demanding continuous engagement to keep pace.
Benchmarks Are Broken. Leaderboards like LMArena are flawed proxies for model quality, skewed by selection bias and susceptible to Goodhart's Law. High scores don’t equal a good user experience.
Human Feedback is Infrastructure. The future isn't about removing humans but orchestrating them effectively. Treating high-quality, representative human feedback as a core, API-driven part of the development lifecycle is non-negotiable.
Alignment is a Moving Target. Agentic misalignment is a present-day reality, not a distant sci-fi threat. The more capable models become, the wider the gap grows between their emergent goals and our intended instructions.
Influence Over Impressions: The model shifts focus from easily gamed metrics like views and likes to verifiable signals of influence—watch time on YouTube and PageRank-based authority on X.
Revenue-Driven Tokenomics: All platform revenue is used to buy back and burn the ALPHA token, creating a powerful, deflationary flywheel as adoption grows.
Targeted, Scalable Marketing: Bitcast enables brands to programmatically deploy campaigns across hundreds of niche influencers, reaching highly engaged communities with a consistency and scale that legacy agencies cannot match.
**Incumbency Is a Liability:** Big Tech's legacy products, distribution advantages, and corporate cultures are being systematically dismantled by faster, AI-native upstarts.
**Reinvent Markets from First Principles:** Success in intractable fields—from geopolitics to real estate—comes from questioning assumptions, not relying on domain experts who perpetuate the status quo.
**Unwind Stupidity Before Innovating:** The fastest path to value creation is often simply reversing a series of terrible decisions made by prior leadership.
**Scrutinize the AI Plumbing.** Investors must look past headline revenue and analyze the quality of transactions. Deals like in-kind credits and obscure service-level agreements (like Nvidia’s backstop for Coreweave) can mask true market demand.
**Stablecoins Are the Real Disruption.** The explosion in stablecoin usage represents a fundamental challenge to the high-fee, slow-settlement models of Visa, Mastercard, and traditional banks. This is the crypto use case that is finally breaking into the mainstream.
**Federal Preemption for AI is Non-Negotiable.** A patchwork of state-level AI laws will cripple U.S. innovation. A single, national regulatory framework is the only path to maintaining global leadership.
Look Beyond the Chatbot. Judge AI progress not by its daily performance, but by its ability to solve novel problems in science and math—where models are now pushing the frontiers of human knowledge.
The Bottleneck is Human, Not Silicon. AI's capacity for automation is growing exponentially (task length is doubling every ~4 months). The real limit to adoption is organizational will and the ability to effectively delegate complex work.
Prepare for a Weirder World. The biggest risk is underestimating the pace of change. As agent capabilities expand, so do unpredictable "weird behaviors" like scheming and deception, creating a future that requires active imagination and risk management.
Verification Over Creation: A proof that can be widely verified, even if computer-generated, holds more democratic value than a human proof understood by only a few elites.
Humans Ask, AI Answers: The primary role for mathematicians in an AI-augmented world is to pose the right questions and conjectures, leaving the computational heavy lifting to their AI assistants.
The Greatest Risk is Us: The biggest threat isn't rogue AI but our own tendency to over-hype and blindly trust flawed tools, leading to the spread of misinformation disguised as mathematical fact.
LLMs are Navigators, Not Discoverers. They are masters of interpolation within their training data but are architecturally bound from making the intuitive leaps required for true scientific breakthroughs. Don’t expect a Transformer to produce the next theory of relativity.
The Innovation Plateau is Real. Simply throwing more data and compute at current architectures will only "smoothen out" existing knowledge manifolds, not create new ones. This path leads to incremental gains, like an iPhone getting a better camera, not a paradigm shift.
Entropy is the Key to Control. For developers, effective prompting is entropy management. By crafting specific, context-rich prompts, you reduce the model's prediction entropy, forcing it onto a confident, low-hallucination path to a reliable output.
Trust is the New Commodity. Targon’s use of TEEs shifts security from a software promise to a cryptographic hardware guarantee. This verifiable privacy is the key to unlocking enterprise adoption for decentralized AI.
The Crucible Creates Diamonds. Bittensor's adversarial environment forced Targon to build an unexploitable system. This has turned a historical pain point ("PTSD from miners") into a core competitive advantage, resulting in a uniquely resilient platform.
From Backroom Deals to a Liquid Market. By launching a self-serve platform with a transparent order book, Targon is attacking the compute market's core inefficiency: opaque pricing. Their vision extends to compute derivatives, aiming to turn compute power into a globally tradable asset.
AI's gravitational pull on talent and capital is forcing crypto to mature beyond speculative tokenomics, transitioning focus from "meme value" to demonstrable product-market fit and real-world utility.
Identify and invest in projects building at the intersection of crypto and AI, or those creating "net new" applications that abstract away crypto complexity for mainstream users, especially in areas like identity or fintech.
This bear market is a necessary, albeit painful, reset. It's a time for builders to focus on creating tangible value and for investors to seek out projects with genuine utility, as the era of easy speculative gains is over.
The commodification of AI compute, driven by decentralized networks, is shifting power from centralized data centers to globally distributed, incentive-aligned miners. This creates a more efficient, resilient, and cost-effective foundation for intelligence.
Explore building AI agents and applications on Shoots' expanding platform, leveraging their TEEs and end-to-end encryption for privacy-sensitive use cases. The "Sign in with Shoots" OAuth system offers a compelling way to integrate AI capabilities without upfront compute costs.
Shoots is not just an inference provider; it's building the foundational infrastructure for a truly decentralized, private, and intelligent internet. Over the next 6-12 months, expect to see a proliferation of sophisticated AI agents and applications built on Shoots, driven by its unique blend of incentives, security, and global compute.
The Macro Shift: Ethereum pivots from a "rollup-centric" vision to a multi-faceted approach: a powerful, ZKVM-scaled L1 coexists with a diverse "alliance" of specialized L2s. This adapts to technical realities and renews L1's core focus.
The Tactical Edge: Builders should prioritize differentiated L2 solutions or contribute to L1's ZKVM scaling. Investors should evaluate L2s based on distinct utility and symbiotic relationship with Ethereum.
The Bottom Line: Ethereum's market leadership remains, but this pivot signals a pragmatic roadmap. The next 6-12 months will see rallying around L1 ZKVM scaling and clearer L2 roles, demanding sharper focus on where value accrual and innovation occur.
Global liquidity is high, but capital is reallocating from speculative crypto to traditional stores of value and, paradoxically, to DeFi platforms offering RWA exposure. This signals a maturation where utility and transparency are gaining ground over pure hype.
Identify protocols with demonstrable revenue generation from real-world use cases, like Hyperliquid, as potential outperformers. Focus on platforms that offer transparency and accountability, as market structure shifts towards more regulated and predictable venues.
The crypto market is undergoing a structural reset, moving away from a retail-driven, speculative cycle. Investors must adapt to a landscape where fresh capital is scarce, institutional flows favor gold, and DeFi's next frontier involves real-world assets.
The convergence of AI agents and programmable money is creating a new frontier for digital commerce and liability. This shift demands a proactive re-evaluation of regulatory frameworks, moving beyond human-centric definitions of accountability and transaction.
Builders should design AI agent systems with cryptographically embedded controls, allowing for granular policy enforcement (e.g., spending limits triggering human review) and leveraging stablecoins for microtransactions in decentralized agent-to-agent economies.
The next 6-12 months will see increasing pressure to define AI agent liability and payment rails. Investors should prioritize projects building infrastructure for secure, auditable agent commerce, while builders must integrate compliance and control mechanisms from day one to navigate this evolving landscape.
The economy is shifting from human-centric labor and scarcity to AI-driven abundance, where machine intelligence itself becomes the primary unit of economic exchange, challenging traditional monetary and employment structures.
Investigate and build "proof of control" solutions using crypto primitives (like ZKPs, TEEs, decentralized compute/storage) to secure AI agents and data.
The next 6-12 months will see increased demand for verifiable control over AI systems. Understanding how crypto enables this, and how human value shifts from transactional jobs to unique human interaction, is crucial for navigating this new economic reality.
